Killing those end of summer blues

As we approach the end of summer and the beginning of the life of Windows 10, PC Perspective and Gigabyte (along with Thermaltake and Kingston) have teamed up to bring our readers a system build guide and giveaway that is sure to get your gears turning. If you think that an X99-based system with an 8-core Intel Extreme processor, SLI graphics, 480GB SSD and 32GB of memory sounds up your alley...pay attention.

Deep in thought...

Even with the dawn of Skylake nearly upon us, there is no debate that the Haswell-E platform will continue to be the basis of the enthusiasts dream system for a long time. Lower power consumption is great, but nothing is going to top 8-cores, 16-threads and all the PCI Express lanes you could need for expansion to faster storage and accessories. With that in mind Gigabyte has partnered with PC Perspective to showcase the power of X99 and what a builder today can expect when putting together a system with a fairly high budget, but with lofty goals in mind as well.

Everyone that reads SSD reviews knows that NAND Flash memory comes with advantages and disadvantages. The cost is relatively good as compared to RAM, and the data remains even with power removed (non-volatile), but there are penalties in the relatively slow programming (write) speeds. To help solve this, today Intel and Micron jointly launched a new type of memory technology.

XPoint (spoken 'cross point') is a new class of memory technology with some amazing characteristics. 10x the density (vs. DRAM), 1000x the speed, and most importantly, 1000x the endurance as compared to current NAND Flash technology.

128Gb XPoint memory dies, currently being made by Intel / Micron, are of a similar capacity to current generation NAND dies. This is impressive for a first generation part, especially since it is physically smaller than a current gen NAND die of the same capacity.

Intel stated that the method used to store the bits is vastly different from what is being used in NAND flash memory today. Intel stated that the 'whole cell' properties change as a bit is being programmed, and that the fundamental physics involved is different, and that it is writable in small amounts (NAND flash must be erased in large blocks). While they did not specifically state it, it looks to be phase change memory (*edit* at the Q&A Intel stated this is not Phase Change). The cost of this technology should end up falling somewhere between the cost of DRAM and NAND Flash.

Intel and Micron stated that this technology is coming very soon. 2016 was stated as a launch year, and there was a wafer shown to us on stage:

You know I'm a sucker for good wafer / die photos. As soon as this session breaks I'll get a better shot!

There will be more analysis to follow on this exciting new technology, but for now I need to run to a Q&A meeting with the engineers who worked on it. Feel free to throw some questions in the comments and I'll answer what I can!

*edit* - here's a die shot:

Added note - this wafer was manufactured on a 20nm process, and consists of a 2-layer matrix. Future versions should scale with additional layers to achieve higher capacities.

Overview

A few years ago, we took our first look at the inexpensive 27" 1440p monitors which were starting to flood the market via eBay sellers located in Korea. These monitors proved to be immensely popular and largely credited for moving a large number of gamers past 1080p.

However, in the past few months we have seen a new trend from some of these same Korean monitor manufacturers. Just like the Seiki Pro SM40UNP 40" 4K display that we took a look at a few weeks ago, the new trend is large 4K monitors.

Built around a 42-in LG AH-IPS panel, the Wasabi Mango UHD420 is an impressive display. Inclusion of HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.2 allow you to achieve 4K at a full 60Hz and 4:4:4 color gamut. At a cost of just under $800 on Amazon, this is an incredibly appealing value.

Whether or not the UHD420 is a TV or a monitor is actually quite the tossup. The lack of a tuner
might initially lead you to believe it's not a TV. Inclusion of a DisplayPort connector, and USB 3.0 hub might make you believe it's a monitor, but it's bundled with a remote control (entirely in Korean). In reality, this display could really be used for either use case (unless you use OTA tuning), and really starts to blur the lines between a "dumb" TV and a monitor. You'll also find VESA 400x400mm mounting holes on this display for easy wall mounting.

[H]ard|OCP have set up their testbed for a 4K showdown between the similarly priced GTX 980 Ti and Radeon R9 Fury X with the $1000 TITAN X tossed in there for those with more money than sense. The test uses the new Catalyst 15.7 and the GeForce 353.30 drivers to give a more even playing field while benchmarking Witcher 3, GTA V and other games. When the dust settled the pattern was obvious and the performance differences could be seen. The deltas were not huge but when you are paying $650 + tax for a GPU even performance a few frames better or a graphical option that can be used really matters. Perhaps the most interesting result was the redemption of the TITAN X, its extra price was reflected in the performance results. Check them out for yourself here.

"We take the new AMD Radeon R9 Fury X and evaluate the 4K gaming experience. We will also compare against the price competitive GeForce GTX 980 Ti as well as a GeForce GTX TITAN X. Which video card provides the best experience and performance when gaming at glorious 4K resolution?"

A couple of sites are claiming that NVIDIA intends to replace the first-generation GeForce GTX 750 Ti with more Maxwell, in the form of the GeForce GTX 950 and/or GTX 950 Ti. The general consensus is that it will run on a cut-down GM206 chip, which is currently found in the GTX 960. I will go light on the rumored specifications because this part of the rumor is single-source, from accounts of a HWBattle page that has been deleted. But for a general ballpark of performance, the GTX 960 has a full GM206 chip while the 950(/Ti) is expected to lose about a quarter of its printed shader units.

The particularly interesting part is the power, though. As we reported, Maxwell was branded as a power-efficient version of the Kepler architecture. This led to a high-end graphics cards that could be powered by the PCIe bus. According to these rumors, the new card will require a single, 8-pin power connector on top of the 75W provided by the bus. This has one of two interesting implications that I can think of.

Either:

The 750 Ti did not sell for existing systems as well as anticipated, or

The GM206 chip just couldn't hit that power target and they didn't want to make another die

Whichever is true, it will be interesting to see how NVIDIA brands this if/when the card launches. Creating a graphics card for systems without available power rails was a novel concept and it seemed to draw attention. That said, the rumors claim they're not doing it this time... for some reason.

NVIDIA SHIELD tablets which were sold over the past 12 months are being recalled by NVIDIA as there is a risk that the battery could overheat, possibly posing a fire hazard and of course proving they should never be used on a re-entry vehicle. You will need to ensure that your SHIELD is running the newest OS, if not you will need to run the tablet long enough to update as older OS versions do not report the serial number, which you need to enter if you want a free replacement from NVIDIA. Visiting www.nvidia.com/support/tabletrecall will give you the steps to request a replacement if you want one. So far there do not seem to be any reports of flaming NVIDIA users but you should probably not risk it.

"NVIDIA today announced a voluntary recall of its SHIELD 8-inch tablets that were sold between July 2014 and July 2015, which the company will replace. NVIDIA has determined that the battery in these tablets can overheat, posing a fire hazard. The recall does not affect any other NVIDIA products."

With not many hours left until launch, Windows 10 is still very obviously a service that is sill being serviced and the pressure is on at Microsoft. NVIDIA users have discovered that having a clearly drawn display is not something they are likely to have by launch day, much to the amusement of us AMD users. Until this week those used to uninstalling programs with the Control Panel as opposed to the new procedure of heading to Settings -> System -> Apps & features will find they are punished for their temerity with a Windows Explorer crash, certainly an interesting choice to reinforce the new behaviour. Less common, though still frequent enough for The Register to make note of and for a patch to be released yesterday is a similar crash if you were to disable an active network connection manually.

Surface users may have noticed new firmware arriving to mitigate some of the compatibility issues Windows 10 testers have used, though there is not that much time left to test them en masse, the fact that the tablets were built by Microsoft should help ensure the updates are stable and useful. Not so much for other tablets as The Register shows in this story.

Creating a new version of an OS is a non-trivial task and for the most part Windows 10 should be ready for a consumer release this week. Microsoft have changed a lot about the look and function of Windows and made even more changes to their business model and licensing. The real hurdle is Enterprise, the huge customer base that ignored Windows 8(.x) and to a lesser extent Windows 7. With the stability and functionality of the OS already in question, will the poorly communicated changes to the licensing models of Windows 10 mean that we will once again see extremely slow or non-existent adoption in Enterprise and even SMB for that matter?

"Build 10240, which was released to the Windows Insider program two weeks ago, is widely considered to be the "release to manufacturing" (RTM) build, even though Redmond itself says the RTM concept doesn't apply in its brave new world of Windows as a Service."

July 29th started the official roll-out of Windows 10 and, for Windows Insiders, was pretty much “Wednesday”. We already had everything of relevance by Monday on the OS side of things, and not even a security patch landed in our Windows Update queue. It was not the only thing that Microsoft launched today, though. While Visual Studio 2015 was released last week, it said that it was not compatible with pre-10240 SDKs and would delete them during the installation process and you will be unable to develop SDK apps until the one for 10240 launches on July 29th.

So, coincident with the OS release, Microsoft finally published the 10240 Windows SDK. Now, if you run Visual Studio 2015's installer, it will install the new SDK directly. You do not need to download it from a secondary source. These headers and libraries are placed in the “Windows Kits” folder of your 32-bit Program Files directory... ironically, without deleting the previous SDKs that it threatened to, when run before July 29th. Go figure.

Also, even though DirectX 12 has been in the Windows SDK for quite some time, Microsoft has, also, finally released code examples and they put them on their GitHub page. These samples teach you how to do things like draw a triangle, manage DirectX 11-era contexts alongside DirectX 12 ones in your application, and create an n-body gravity simulation. They welcome pull requests for fixes, although they might appreciate new samples as well.

Yes, PCIe soundcards are still being made and Powercolor's Devil HDX is up for review on Overclockers Club. As with most new cards this one features three OPAMPs which can can be removed and swapped with another to change the sound that is sent to your headset or speakers. On the back are a 124db rated 6.3mm headphone jack, left and right RCA jacks, Coax output, and an optical output. The daughtercard sports 5 standard analog 3.5mm jacks to give you 7.1 surround sound support if you have the speakers for it. It is about $160 so make sure you have ears that are good enough to deserve high end sound, for many users this might be a bit of overkill.

"Setup as a stand alone solution, the Devil HDX gets to play in the best of both worlds with 124dB rated performance from the parent card and the option of running 7.1 sound through the addition of the daughter card. Here is my only beef with the Devil HDX. I know these are options that add cost, but when cultivating a brand it would just add to the package."

Introduction, Packaging, and A Closer Look

Introduction

We haven’t had a chance to sit down with any racing wheels for quite some time here at PC Perspective. We have an old Genius wheel on a shelf in the back of our closet here at the office. Ryan played around with that a few years back, and that was the extent of the racing wheel usage here at home base. Josh, on the other hand, frequents driving sims with a Thrustmaster F430. I hadn’t ventured into racing sims, though I do dabble with the real thing a bit.

Today we are covering the G29, which is a PS3/PS4/PC specific model from Logitech. There is an Xbox/PC variant coming soon in the form of the G920, with will have a different (fewer) button layout and no LED RPM/shift display.

The X99-M WS combines the Haswell-E platform with extra certification for workstation computers, and it does so in a microATX form factor. The WS line goes through extra QA against a variety of accessories and add-in boards, which should lead to less situations where something like a user's wants to install two different video capture cards in their system, but ends up getting random blue screens.

As expected, the motherboard uses the X99 chipset, which allows Core i7 and Xeon processors with up two eighteen cores. It can accept up to 64 GB of DDR4 memory, which can be aligned in a quad-channel formation. It allows dual graphics cards from both AMD and NVIDIA, even though it has three PCIe 3.0 lanes. I assume this is because a dual-slot graphics card would cover up the third x16 bus -- this is a microATX motherboard, after all.

Beyond being a small, workstation-certified motherboard, it also has USB 3.1 (which brings 10 Gbps of bandwidth to external devices). This is obviously useful for external storage, and that has a lot of uses for workstation applications.

The ASUS X99-M is available now for $279.99 MSRP. It is currently listed on Newegg at $275.99 with a three year warranty, but I cannot find an official warranty listing from ASUS to confirm that.

Introduction and First Impressions

The MSI GT72 Dominator Pro G gaming laptop is a beast of a portable, with a GeForce GTX 980M graphics card and a 5th-Gen Intel Core i7 processor within its massive frame. And this iteration of the GT72 features NVIDIA's G-SYNC technology, which should help provide smooth gameplay on its 75 Hz IPS display.

The gaming laptop market is filled with options at just about any price you can imagine (as long as your imagination starts at around $1000), and there are seemingly limitless combinations of specs and minute configuration differences even within a particular brand’s offering. A few names stand out in this market, and MSI has created a product meant to stand tall against the likes of Alienware and ASUS ROG. And it doesn’t just stand tall, it stands wide - and deep for that matter. Running about the size of home plate on a regulation baseball diamond (well, approximately anyway), this is nearly 8 ½ lbs of PC gaming goodness.

Not everyone needs a 17-inch notebook, but there’s something awesome about these giant things when you see them in person. The design of this GT72 series is reminiscent of an exotic sports car (gaming laptops in general seem to have fully embraced the sports car theme), and if you’re considering completely replacing a desktop for gaming and all of your other computing the extra space it takes up is more than worth it if you value a large display and full keyboard. Doubtless there are some who would simply be augmenting a desktop experience with a supremely powerful notebook like this, but for most people laptops like this are a major investment that generally replaces the need for a dedicated PC tower.

What about the cost? It certainly isn’t “cheap” considering the top-of-the-line specs, and price is clearly the biggest barrier to entry with a product like this - far beyond the gargantuan size. Right off the bat I’ll bring up this laptop’s $2099 retail price - and not because I think it’s high. It’s actually very competitive as equipped. And in addition to competitive pricing MSI is also ahead of the curve a bit with its adoption of the 5th-Gen Core i7 Broadwell mobile processors, while most gaming laptops are still on Haswell. Broadwell’s improved efficiency should help with battery life a bit, but your time away from a power plug is always going to be limited with gaming laptops!

Introduction and Features

Introduction

Introducing Cyonic, a new player in the global PC power supply arena. Founded in 2013, Cyonic’s goal is to become a global brand of high performance computer parts and accessories. The business is starting off by selling power supplies and Cyonic will soon have three product lines: the AU Series (fixed cables), AUx Series (all modular cables), and the Arise Series (sold exclusively in Japan). The AU and AUx Series will both contain three models, ranging in output capacities of 450W, 550W, and 650W. In this review we will take a detailed look at the AU-450x we received for evaluation.

The new Cyonic AUx Series power supplies feature fully modular cables, quiet operation and high efficiency. And they are housed in a compact chassis that measures only 140mm (5.5”) deep. Cyonic suggests the AUx Series power supplies are “the ideal choice for office use, casual gaming, and Home Theater PCs”. Getting into the PC power supply market might seem a rather daunting task, but Cyonic has partnered with Seasonic as their OEM, which is certainly a good start.

BattleTech is coming back baby! Harebrained Schemes who have successfully rebooted the Shadowrun RPG system on PC and who are in the final steps of releasing the third game in that world have just announced plans to start a new Kickstarter campaign. This time it will be a trip to the world of Battletech, the details are slim but we can expect to see both the larger view of the Battletech galaxy and the Houses that populate it as well as mech management and combat. From what Rock, Paper, SHOTGUN were told this will be turn-based, not the FPS style of the Mechwarrior series of old. No matter, this news is still exciting so keep your eyes peeled for more information.

"Harebrained Schemes is pleased to announce their return to Kickstarter this Fall to partner with backers in co-funding the creation of BATTLETECH. Jordan Weisman, the creator of BattleTech and MechWarrior, is back with the first turn-based BattleTech game for PC in over two decades."

You are nowhere near as fed up with Win10 stories as you will be in a week or so sit down and get reading. So far the biggest new issue has been those who have over 512 apps in their Start menu, not inconceivable but certainly not common. Over at The Register a story has been put up covering Win10 by a person who admits to having 4,000 open browser tabs and sending the machine into hibernation in that state. Their experiences show that Win10 doesn't care and even likes this sort of abuse as long as it is on an SSD. That is not to say all is good, for there is still the technicolour yawn which is the new Start menu and the disturbing tendency for the OS to call on mom more often than Norman Bates. Read the full article to see the good, bad and bothersome.

"It's Windows 10 day. That means it's time for a completely biased and in-no-way-even-remotely-objective assessment of Windows 10."

Microsoft's decision to push out updates to non-enterprise Windows 10 without user intervention or even notification has been a bit of a hot topic recently. While those of us who have been supporting machines for a while have all seen a bad Windows update or 10 which render machines unusable, however we have also seen machines over 100 updates behind that are completely riddled with malware, trojans and other nasties which would have been blocked if those updates had been applied.

Whichever side of that debate you fall on, thanks to the nosy reporters at The Register you now can have a choice. They've posted a link to the "Show or hide updates" troubleshooter package in this recent article, a tool from Microsoft which would allow you to hide certain updates before they were installed and ensure that they are not installed in the future. Patch Tuesday is gone but there will still be people keeping track of which updates are released so that if you encounter an issue you can roll back and hide that update. Of course, that assumes you enabled System Restore, which is has been disabled by default in Windows 10.

lifted from securityaffairs.co

"MICROSOFT HAS QUIETLY released a tool to stop Windows 10 downloading and installing everything it finds in Windows Update."

Morry likes big coolers and Noctua is one of his preferred brands when he wants to test the tensile stregth of a motherboard. Not all of Noctua's coolers are up to his preferences, such as the slender NH-L9x65, a waif-like 413g with the fan attached and a cute 95x95x79mm in size with a 14mm lift from that fan. TechPowerUp's testing shows that the fan is quite quiet even when spinning at full speed but even still the temperatures of the i7-4770K it was cooling were the highest on the charts. If you are cooling a CPU with a lower TDP in a small case, or even a 4770K then check out this review, the NH-L9x65 is a little expensive but certainly usable.

"Noctua's new NH-L9x65 is a low profile, small form-factor cooler. When I say small, I mean tiny as it is only slightly larger than the Intel stock heatsink, which is surprising and begs me to question its maximum potential. While performance most likely won't be its strong point, there is a chance this pint-sized offering will have a few surprises in store"

The graphics core of new CPUs used to have issues on Linux at launch but recently this has become much less of an issue. The newly released Iris Pro on the 5770C follows this trend as you can see in the benchmarks at Phoronix. The OpenGL performance is a tiny bit slower overall on Linux, apart from OpenArena, but not enough to ruin your gaming experience. With a new kernel on the horizon and a community working with the new GPU you can expect the performance gap to narrow. Low cost gaming on a Linux machine becomes more attractive every day.

"Resulting from the What Windows 10 vs. Linux Benchmarks Would You Like To See and The Phoronix Test Suite Is Running On Windows 10, here are our first benchmarks comparing the performance of Microsoft's newly released Windows 10 Pro x64 against Fedora 22 when looking at the Intel's OpenGL driver performance across platforms."